The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called jurist Navi Pillay, who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a "bigot" against Jews for saying Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Pillay, a South African judge and human rights champion, won the prize in recognition of her work against war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Between 2021 and 2025, she chaired a commission of enquiry created by the UN Human Rights Council to probe the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The panel, which does not speak for the UN and has faced harsh Israeli criticism, found that "genocide is occurring in Gaza and is continuing to occur", Pillay told AFP in 2025.
"The responsibility lies with the State of Israel," she said.
"The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass. It has awarded its highest honour to a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state," Netanyahu's office posted on X.
The statement went on to accuse Pillay, a former judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC), of fostering "demonisation of the Jews".
Pillay told at the time of the UN Commission report on Gaza that her team had shared "thousands of pieces of information" with ICC prosecutors.
Israel had rejected accusations that it has committed genocide in Gaza.
In a scathing statement earlier on Friday, Israel's foreign ministry said the Nobel committee's decision to award Pillay legitimised "anti-Israel hatred".
"Now that the Nobel commission has rewarded the biggest lie of the 21st century, Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell," the Israeli foreign ministry posted on X, referring to the Nazi propagandist.
Pillay on Friday said she dedicated her award to the "survivors of international crimes", speaking from the courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany where the trials prosecuting World War II Nazi leaders took place.
The daughter of a bus driver in a family of Tamil descent, 85-year-old Pillay's career has taken her from South African courts, where she defended anti-apartheid activists, to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda after its 1994 genocide, and the ICC.
Pillay had also led investigations into potential ICC charges against US troops for war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She gained global prominence for her outspoken condemnation of government repression of popular protests in the Arab world, including Libya and Syria.
Pillay is currently an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice, working on a case deciding whether Myanmar's crackdown on the Rohingya breached the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, with a ruling expected in the coming months.
The Hague-based ICC said in 2024 it had reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu was responsible for war crimes in the Gaza campaign, which responded to Hamas's deadly October 7, 2023 attacks.
Netanyahu denies the ICC claims.
(With inputs from AFP)